Study in Charcoal
by Nancy Brown
Summary: "Let me take you to bed."


Title: Study in Charcoal (#12)  
>Author: <strong>nancybrown<strong>  
>CharactersPairings: Jack/Ianto, Ianto/Lisa (team mentioned)  
>Rating: R<br>Words: 4000  
>Beta: <strong>fide_et_spe<strong>  
>Spoilers: Up through DW: Journey's End<br>Warnings: canon character death, mentions of suicidal thoughts  
>Summary: "Let me take you to bed."<br>AN: Companion piece to "The Measure of Our Sorrows" though familiarity with that story is not required.

* * *

><p>"Let me take you to bed."<p>

Jack asked as casually as if making a request for a sandwich, and his face held an expression of no more than polite interest in the answer. Sitting at his desk, handing over the last of tonight's pile of paperwork for Ianto to file in the morning, he may as well have been talking about a case.

It was the end of another long day. Ianto had once thought Torchwood London was full of long days, when he'd have to stay until almost seven o'clock some nights when he was working on a project. He'd been working for Torchwood Cardiff for not quite a week now, and no workday had ended before ten. He was coming to understand this was not unusual.

He was tired, and stressed, and convinced his ears were playing tricks on him. Then again, knowing the Captain, and the fact that Ianto had banked the entire plan on what he and Lisa could scrounge together from the rumours about the Captain's reputation, his ears were likely telling him the truth.

Realising that a stretched-out silence was worse than no reply, he settled for what he hoped was a mildly perplexed yet not entirely disinterested, "Sir?"

"It's late, we're both tired. You could stay here." As before, the tone was neutral, without the pressuring edge Ianto had steeled himself to expect. Given how he'd thrown himself at Jack with tight jeans, good coffee, and a damn dinosaur to catch his attention, he'd known the man would expect him to follow through.

He didn't intend to follow through.

"I don't think I should."

"Should doesn't apply. The question is, do you want to?"

For a moment, there were two of him: one who wanted nothing else than to nurse Lisa back to health and save her from the metal infection nibbling her away in pieces and love her for the rest of his life, and one who wanted to forget the last hellish month and bury himself in what was right in front of him for a few hours of mindless distraction. Not wanting Jack did not occur to him as an option.

"Want isn't everything. Goodnight, sir."

He refused to hurry his steps. He wasn't running away. He absolutely did not feel Jack's eyes boring into the back of his neck.

He did go check on Lisa.

"You're late," she said, when her eyes had focused on him, but it was with the same gentle mockery she'd used back in their flat a million years ago. He'd come home after his supervisor kept him late, and found Lisa on the sofa wearing one of his ties and not another stitch of clothing, and she'd teased him for his tardiness before undoing him into a happy puddle.

"How are you feeling?"

"It hurts. I'll manage." She was direct with what she wanted, and always had been, and he loved that about her.

He checked the drip he'd installed two days ago, then pulled from his pocket the iPod he'd bought and filled with her favourite songs. As he set it up for her to play, her smile lit up the whole dark cellar. There was nothing in the world he wanted more than for her to be happy.

* * *

><p>"Let me take you to bed," Jack said, and his eyes were dark, shadowed with the death they'd covered up this morning. Suzie's body lay cooling in the morgue, the PC had been sent on her way with a job offer, and Ianto was currently the only one who hadn't been violating the directive about removing alien tech from the base. His alien tech was safely stashed inside, but no-one needed to know that.<p>

Jack's hand was warm on his arm, just holding him for some human contact. They had washed up after cleaning the mess on the Plass, but his touch still spoke of blood and sent Ianto's skin crawling under his shirt.

"You couldn't have seen it coming, sir." Ianto offered a reassuring smile with his deflection. "She kept everything to herself until it was too late. This is not your fault."

His words echoed back to his own comfort. The murders were bad, but Suzie's suicide rattled him, coming on the heels of the news of yet another Torchwood London survivor taking that route. He was surrounded by death but Ianto was fine, would be fine. He had something to live for.

"I should have known better," Jack said, and yes, Ianto was just a means to make himself forget. He leaned in, breathing against Ianto's ear. "I should have seen it, all of it."

"You're only human."

The expression he received in return was bitter, and older than the man's forty years. Perhaps that was part of what was wrong tonight: Suzie's death reminded Jack of his own mortality and failings, and he wanted to have some life-affirming (or youth-affirming) sex with the first available person. This impression was strengthened when Jack pressed the lightest nip against Ianto's ear while Ianto shivered with sudden heat.

"Come to my room, and I can do things to you that'll make you forget your own name. I want you. You want me." His hand drifted, reaching around behind Ianto, resting on the small of his back. "Say yes."

"I can't." Ianto heard a husky note in his own voice he didn't intend. He backed away from Jack's embrace. "I don't … " He tried again, reaching for something that would make sense. "I just shut my friend's body away in the morgue. I can't set that aside."

"You'd be amazed what good sex can help you set aside." The dark expression was gone now, though, hidden under what Ianto could just recognise as a mask. Jack even managed a grim smile. "But fine."

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow. And Ianto?"

"Hm?"

"_That_was harassment." His eyes were merry as he said it, and if Ianto hadn't seen them in pain a few minutes ago, he'd have been fooled.

"Noted."

* * *

><p>Jack's impromptu propositions stopped after Gwen came aboard, to Ianto's relief and minor regret. As long as Jack was spending time thinking about fucking him, he wasn't spending time wondering what else Ianto was doing. Now it seemed Jack's attention had drifted to their newest teammate, perhaps thinking that if Ianto wouldn't give into his charms, Gwen was more than happy to be swept off her feet by the whirlwind of this place. Not for her would Jack ask off-handedly, he was certain. Gwen would be presented with fine meals, dancing, and chocolates, her seduction a matter of careful planning rather than an end-of-day request for a quick fuck to forget Jack's woes. Ever the good servant, Ianto drew up a list of restaurants, clubs, and chocolatiers for when Jack inevitably needed the information.<p>

Ianto went back to his shadows and his secrets.

Lisa was getting worse. He'd had to up the dosage on her medicines, tweaking the cocktail with every day's alteration more desperate than the last. Without Jack's attention, he could spend more time here with her in the orange light of the lamp, reading to her, replaying song after song, but she spent the hours drifting, her gaze muddied with sedatives.

"Tell me where we'll go," she said one night when she was lucid. "Where will you take me?"

"I think a cabin in the mountains, somewhere quiet. We won't even have a telephone. We'll walk into the village once a week to collect the post."

"Quiet's good," she said, eyes dreamy. "What will we do?"

"That's easy. We'll draw the curtains and make love all day."

"What about food?" She was teasing him now, and he teased back.

"Whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and bananas make a perfectly balanced diet. With all that sex, we'll burn off the calories."

"You do think of everything."

And for a while, he let himself believe things were going to be okay.

* * *

><p>Jack didn't proposition him after they gunned down Lisa. Ianto was expecting at best an ultimatum, at worst merely a shift in target as they reloaded. He was given a suspension, during which the others barely spoke to him, and while Jack did come to check on him, he kept things professional, as much as Jack ever managed professional.<p>

"How much of it was a lie?" Jack asked as he was leaving after a check-in. The expression he'd worn after Suzie was back on his face.

"I can't answer that," Ianto said. "I don't think I even know anymore."

He didn't see Jack out.

* * *

><p>"Take me to bed."<p>

His voice was slurred, not that anyone would notice without listening closely. Ianto was coming to realise that half of what Jack gave away, he only offered to the very observant. The most unobservant could see the depth of his grief for the poor murdered old woman, for the little girl he'd surrendered. Jack was in pain, and he'd been drinking, and the rest of the team had left him in disgust, even the ingénue he'd been grooming.

Ianto ought to leave. Instead he approached the desk, awash in the pool of light from Jack's lamp. "Would it be cliché to point out you've had enough?"

"Probably."

"Then I won't." He did however move the glass from Jack's reach. "I also won't ask if you want to talk about it."

"I don't."

"So I gathered."

Their recent past prickled between them, like embracing a hedgehog. It wasn't just Ianto's betrayal, but the hundred small betrayals he'd had to commit in Lisa's name. Not just Jack's big fuckup with the Jasmine situation, but every fuckup he'd committed as their leader for an organisation that had essentially expired six months ago with the fall of Torchwood One. Jack had forgiven him Lisa. Ianto could forgive this business with the faeries. Everything else? Those absolutions required the forgiveness of saints, and neither of them would ever qualify.

"Take me to bed," Jack said again, urgently. "I just want to forget."

"Come on," Ianto said, taking his hand. Jack went giddy as they climbed down the ladder to the unlit bunker below, where Ianto had dusted and straightened many times before as was his duty. Now he pushed Jack to a sitting position on the manky little camp bed, and crouched between his legs.

Jack grinned in his drunkenness. "Y'know, I was expecting to start with more kissing. I'm a fantastic kisser." He reached for Ianto, who ducked as he untied Jack's boots and pulled them off.

His fingers worked much better than Jack's, and easily undid the buttons on Jack's shirt, carefully tugging off the braces before removing the shirt. "Come here," Jack breathed, diving in for Ianto's waistcoat, but Ianto pushed his hands away.

"Lie down."

Jack gave him a saucy grin and complied. "I like this take-charge version of you. What else do you have in mind?"

Ianto returned the smile. Then he pulled up the blanket over Jack. "Sleep. Good night, sir."

"What?" Jack sat up, but Ianto was already back at the ladder. "Ianto?"

"You're tired and you're drunk. Sleep it off, sir. I'll see you in the morning."

There was a groan from below him.

* * *

><p>"I'm taking you home."<p>

Jack didn't look at him as he started the SUV. He'd told Ianto to wait out here while he walked Toshiko into her flat and got her settled. In the blink of an eye, he was already back behind the wheel, and Ianto could not remember anything in-between. The time on the clock said it was afternoon, but the clouds pressed thickly around them, compressing the air and the sky, and he could see no sun at all. It could have been any time, or no time. Timeless.

He made a noise in his throat, not quite amusement, not quite agreement.

Jack watched him. "Also happy to take you right back to hospital. Ianto?"

"What?"

"What day is it?"

"November. Third?" The clouds drifted into the car with them and filled his head with cotton. Painkillers, from Owen, hastily prescribed and washed down with warm water. He let out a laugh.

"Home. Right." Jack drove off from Tosh's place, mindful of the traffic laws but only just. He drove without question to Ianto's building, and it took Ianto several sluggish tries to remember that Jack had been to his flat on multiple occasions.

A strong shoulder helped him out of the car and up the stairs, pouring him onto the sofa like so much dirty laundry. Ianto sat there, thinking about nothing, looking at his hands, and the efficient, white bandages the nurse had used to cover the ligature marks on his wrists. Another graced the nick on his throat. His first conscious thought was that he must look like an incompetent suicide. His second was that someone was running water in the bathroom.

Jack stood in front of him, out of nowhere. Magically-appearing Jacks must happen all the time. "I can stay and help you if you can't navigate the bath."

Stay, Ianto thought, blinking up at Jack, who was taller than the moon and who'd saved his life. Stay with me, and hold me and bed me and make me forget the last two days. If I feel you, I won't feel them driving a bat into my ribs. If I breathe you, it won't be the stench of the dead bodies. Let me taste you and wash my mouth clean again.

"I'll be fine," he said. "Thank you."

"Are you sure?" Jack looked unconvinced.

Stay. "I'm sure. Go on."

The door to the flat clicked shut. Ianto hadn't even seen him leave.

* * *

><p>He woke in the dark in Jack's bed, trembling and groggy. His mouth tasted furred from the hangover of whatever pills Jack given him, but he'd slept like a rock. From the warmth on the other side, and his unclear memory, he didn't think he'd slept alone. From the fact that he was still in his vest and pants and wasn't uncomfortably sticky anywhere, and from the rapidly-approaching train that was his memory of last night, he knew he hadn't done anything with Jack except sleep. The stone in his stomach settled into a solid, painful weight.<p>

If Jack had left the rest of the pills down here, Ianto could dry-swallow them and finish what he'd started. He didn't find the bottle in the dim twilight. He did find his clothes, the ones he'd worn here, and removed in the showers, setting them aside as a last skin before he'd adjusted the taps to a good, warm stream that would wash his body. He'd not intended to wear the hoodie or the jeans again. He'd planned to be dead now.

Jack hadn't stopped him. He'd sat next to him, and he'd waited for Ianto to choose, and the tickle of memory that followed told him Jack had made a promise Ianto couldn't recall.

He put on the clothes.

One last vague search of Jack's tiny room didn't yield an easy means to kill himself, nor did he expect it would. He climbed the ladder, slowly, into the lit office above him.

* * *

><p>"Take me to bed."<p>

The nip of whisky he'd stolen burned in his words. Too much, seeing Tosh held captive by the monster she'd loved. Too much, going over with her word for word everything that had led her to bringing the alien threat into the Hub: this is the way a heart cracks open, this is the way one breaks. Too. Fucking. Much.

Jack's hand stopped in mid-air, the fountain pen paused above the paper like a divine hesitation. The lights from the Hub and the light on his desk cast strange shadows in relief as he turned. The pen lowered, was set carefully aside, making a soft _tick_as it touched the desktop. Jack tilted his head.

"Why?"

Of the hundred responses Ianto had expected, ninety-three of which involved Jack ripping off some type of clothing from one or both of them, he hadn't anticipated being asked why.

He wet his lips, and he noticed how Jack's eyes immediately focused on his mouth. Ah. The answer was yes, and the rest of this was mere negotiation of boundaries. Ianto relaxed.

"Because you want me. Because I want you. Because neither of us has anyone better to be with tonight. Take me to bed, Jack. Please."

Jack clicked off the lamp. Then he took Ianto's hand.

He _was_a fantastic kisser.

* * *

><p>Sometimes they asked with words. Sometimes gestures were enough. After Suzie, there was the stopwatch and he didn't bother pretending he was upset about putting away her corpse this time. During and after the business with Eugene, there were playful comments that flew right by the others, though Owen's gaze lingered the longest. Stinking of exhaust on Christmas Eve, there was nothing but the dead expression in Jack's eyes, and thin pleasure in the darkness of his bunker.<p>

After 1941, and the Rift, and the bullet Ianto fired for Jack's sake, he went to ask and Jack interrupted. "Not … not tonight."

Ianto nodded in understanding he didn't feel, because this thing they had was nothing, this was less than nothing, and he went back to his flat and turned on every single light. Only surrounded by a glow so bright his closed eyelids saw red could he fall asleep.

* * *

><p>"Stay with me?"<p>

There were five suites reserved at the St. David's Hotel. Three of them were on the fourth floor. Two were on the sixth.

Ianto held his passcard. Jack stood there, waiting for an answer.

"Are we skipping that date, then?"

Jack's mouth quirked. "Never. I'm not asking you for sex, Ianto."

"This may be a first."

"Just stay with me?" His face was older. If what Gwen had told them was true, that wasn't possible: Jack didn't die, and he didn't age. But he'd changed in subtle ways.

Ianto inserted his passcard into the reader, waited for the light to turn green, and then opened the door to his room.

"Coming?" he asked.

* * *

><p>After Beth and after Tommy, things were easy. After Rhys and the space whale, they were hard. After the two days they couldn't remember, Jack went home with him for the first time, and they curled together in the line cast on the duvet by the orange sodium streetlamp outside the window, piercing through a slit in the curtain. By daybreak the sheets reeked of sex. By noon so did the sofa.<p>

When Owen came back from death, he haunted the Hub like the ghost he wasn't, and Jack came to Ianto's flat night after night. When Gwen's wedding went almost entirely not as planned, Ianto didn't invite him back in the wee hours of the morning, but the next day he found an offering of fine chocolates on his desk and a folded note: _Can I take you somewhere tonight?_

After the Night Travellers came out of the film, they rented the lousiest movies they could find, and watched them together at Ianto's flat. Sometimes they didn't leave the Hub at night, preferring to stay close, and they learned a lesson about listening when the cog door alarm went off, no matter what anyone's tongue was doing at the time. The sex after was anger-fuelled and absent. When Jack returned from Flat Holm, he said only, "Come see me in my office." It helped to know they'd both been right. The sex after was apologetic.

Jack hated labels, which made sense when Ianto considered that the world would happily hammer the enormity of Jack's personality into a tiny box called "bisexual," ignoring the depth and breadth of him. Ianto craved order and categorisation, but months after Martha had cornered him, he still had no better name to put around what he and Jack were to each other. He made half a dozen false starts calling his sister, only to bite down on the words before he mentioned Jack at all.

Then came the bombs, and the long, terrible night.

Jack's coat and skin smelled of dirt and death, though the old team had allowed him to bathe before freezing him one hundred-odd years ago. He'd aged enough that even Gwen saw the changes this time, and his eyes held more shadows than anyone's should.

"Take me out somewhere," he wrote in his file, knowing Ianto was reading over his shoulder, and it was Ianto's turn to flick off the lamp and offer his hand, and lead Jack up and out of the dark, empty place where they spent so much damned time.

* * *

><p>"I'm coming back," Jack promised, that eager smile on his face, and Ianto didn't believe him, wouldn't tell him about the threat bearing down on them. Jack had to know, but he didn't think when the Doctor was involved, and he wouldn't stop long enough to consider that the same devils who'd just gunned down Harriet Jones were headed towards the source of their cry for help.<p>

After they cleaned up the husk of the Dalek and the worst of the mess, Ianto shooed Gwen home to be with Rhys. "Jack will be back when he can," he assured her with the same smile Jack had given them. It was a good lie, he thought to himself, full of hope without acknowledging how long Jack would probably be away now that he had his Doctor and his wrist strap and his friends. If Gwen saw through him, she didn't say, only pecked him on the cheek and left.

Ianto straightened up more of the Hub, making minor repairs as he found things broken by the sudden earthquakes, keeping an ear open for the regular alerts but even the usual troublemakers seemed to be laying low in the aftermath.

He woke with a start, sitting on the sofa, Jack's hand on the back of his neck. "Good morning, sleeping beauty."

"Is it morning?"

"Nope." Jack dropped onto the sofa beside him, weariness like a second coat.

"Not popping off to visit Alpha Centauri, then?" Or coming back already from it?

"Nah, you know me. Save the universe and then straight back in time for dinner."

"How's Martha?"

"She's well. She says hello and that the invitations are going out next week."

"Lovely." Around him, he could hear the odd fluctuations in noise that told him the Hub was still not right, that something needed to be oiled or set or fixed. On the scanner, he heard the monotone of the police reports, checking for damage, reporting on the last of the looters as the rain washed them off the streets. If the weather kept up, the Weevils would be emerging sooner rather than later, drowned in their nests and angry all over again.

"Why did you come back?"

Jack put on his bullshit expression, but his eyes raked over where the Dalek's remains were, and that swept the pretence away. He took Ianto's hand from where it rested beside him on the sofa, and gave it a squeeze. "Because I wanted to." He sounded so damn tired. He also sounded happy.

"Take me home," Ianto said, and Jack nodded. God alone knew what time it was, but Ianto was done here until after some sleep. Together, they put the Hub into overnight status, set the alarms to Jack's wrist strap, and turned off the lights. Tomorrow was soon enough to deal with the rest of this mess.

The clouds outside hid the sun as they drove home, but the flat was undamaged, and their bed was warm, and they drew the curtains against what light there was, and they stayed there the rest of the day.

They even had bananas.

* * *

><p>The End<p>

AN: As always, my favourite words are, "I liked this."


End file.
